“WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE,” the current occupant of the White House wrote on social media on March 17 — a statement that reads less like presidential leadership and more like adolescent petulance. The prior week, a super PAC linked to the administration circulated a fundraising email featuring an image of the president, in a baseball cap, saluting the coffins of slain service members, paired with offers of private national security briefings for donors.
As these examples make plain, the American public is asked, again and again, to absorb conduct that would have once prompted immediate bipartisan condemnation, from rhetoric unfit for a middle school principal to the use of fallen heroes in political fundraising. These are not subtle breaches of decorum — they are blatant violations of basic standards of responsibility and respect.
Yet what follows is not accountability. It is silence from many elected officials and, more strikingly, a surge of public defense from citizens who no longer simply respond to partisan messaging but actively amplify it. On social media, misinformation no longer needs direction — it sustains itself in a self-replicating pattern of anger, ignorance and all-consuming self-righteousness.
We now inhabit a political media environment that rewards outrage above all else. Algorithms elevate anger because anger drives engagement. The result is a feedback loop in which emotional intensity replaces factual grounding, and ideological loyalty supplants independent judgment.
This is not only confined to one party. The broader danger is a culture in which increasing numbers of Americans — across the political spectrum — are unwilling or unable to evaluate information outside the boundaries of their own partisan identity. As Shakespeare warned, I repeat, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.”
Take a moment to observe the digital spaces that act as 21st century town squares. (Look at the over 42,000-member “New Hampshire Politics” group on Facebook, if you dare.) In such digital groups, one finds not healthy debate but a steady stream of vitriolic falsehoods, often delivered with moral certainty and amplified by repetition. The effect is cancerous: ignorance paired with zealotry, absolutely unbending to correction of any kind, no matter how gentle.
This is how a civic culture erodes — not all at once, but through millions of moments of willful blindness, through a myriad of abdications of responsibility, by leaders who lower the bar and citizens who follow them there, all too gleefully.
But what we are witnessing is not just toxic political tribalism. It’s the growing normalization of a way of thinking (or lack thereof) in which truth is absolutely relative to ideological dogma, cruelty is excused, if not celebrated, and self-righteousness is valued more than asking questions that open up a world more complicated than we could ever know. (“The only thing I know is that I know nothing,” Socrates once admitted for us all.)
If we continue down this path, the escalation of dangerous rhetoric increases the risk of further political violence. And it does not emerge in a vacuum — it is shaped, in part, by what we tolerate, what we amplify and what we choose not to challenge, lest it raise uncomfortable questions about our own political loyalties. The question is no longer only what our politics says about our leaders, but what it reflects about us.
As a parent and as a citizen who wishes prosperity for Republicans and Democrats alike, I harbor grave concerns about where we’re heading as a nation and as a state. But concern alone is not enough. The question is not merely what our president (or local/state officials) will do next, or what algorithms will push, or what politicians will excuse. The question is whether we, as citizens, will demand more of our leaders, of our media and of ourselves, from a place that transcends ideological rigidity. Because if we do not draw that line, no one else will.
This is a great nation. But we must struggle to maintain that greatness or it will devolve further into tribal unrest that can only invite hardship and chaos. With a commitment to peace and human dignity, with courage, I urge you to challenge political radicalism from any part of the political spectrum. The Republic cannot endure without citizens willing to demand better.
What will you do?
Brandon K. Gauthier, Ph.D. is a historian and educator from Concord. He is the author of “Before Evil: Young Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Kim” and specializes in the history of totalitarian states.